Chapter 63 Emory
POWER COULD BE TAKEN, AND so Emory would take it away from Clover once and for all.
She tapped into the essence of the keys as she might have once done with Romie, Aspen, and Tol, felt them coursing through her veins.
Her mother stood at her side, and Emory could sense the residual echo of Atheia that her blood carried, a hunch they’d all had that proved true now.
Luce told her to take it—to tap into this faint trickle of power she carried—and so Emory gently pried it from her, careful not to weaken her mother like she had weakened Romie in the past.
Fueled by the old keys, she called on the ungodly power within Clover, desperate to take it away from him—all the magic he’d stolen from keys and gods and every soul he had ever done violence to or betrayed.
Clover was too strong. The gods had been right: even with the power of the previous keys fueling her, Emory was no match for him.
But if she were to sever his link to his source of power…
The souls of the dead were as relentless as they had been in the abyss, and more so now than ever.
They did not whisper to her as they did then, begging to be used, to be freed; they were Clover’s now, and his alone, trapped in a sort of twisted symbiotic relationship with him.
They made him the god that he was, and through him, their power continued to flow.
Through him, they got to taste magic—life—however corrupt.
They grew angrier, more restless, feeding on his own anger.
And he grew fouler with that venom coursing through him.
Emory hadn’t wanted their ghostly power, and she was glad she hadn’t let them anywhere near her. But this couldn’t go on. She needed to stop them, to stop him.
She caught sight of his features among the throng of ghosts. Keiran. It didn’t matter then, the bad choices he had made, the vile things he had done. He and all of these souls deserved a second chance. An opportunity to rest, if that’s what they desired, or to try again.
In her mind, Emory heard Sidraeus telling her she would have to put to rest the sacrificed Tidecallers, much like she had healed the umbrae that first time she’d crossed through the space between worlds.
Maybe it was what she needed to do with these souls, too, for balance to be restored, for Clover to be destroyed.
But they were an unshakable force against the small power she wielded, even with the three keys she was drawing on, even with her mother at her side lending her strength.
Emory needed more, so she opened herself up to powers that went beyond the keys, calling on the magic of every being who bore a trace of Sidraeus’s might—not only the Eclipse-born, but their otherworldly equivalents, too, the hellwraiths and eldritch beasts and Songless who were all a result of the clashing vision between two creators, products of liminality that would never have existed without Sidraeus and Atheia both.
They were all the same, in the end. Desperate to not only survive, but to belong.
Emory could feel their familiar magic rush through her, making her shine with brilliant light. She wasn’t stealing power from them; it was like when she had borrowed power from Romie, Aspen, and Tol at the Forge, a friend calling out for help and receiving it.
Fueled by all their combined power, Emory faced the specters with a single thought.
Heal.
She erupted in brilliant light, and every specter it touched seemed to quiet, shucking off all the pain and hate and resentment and unsettling thought they had let fester inside them.
Theirs was not an unmaking, but a release.
They did not vanish, but flowed gently into the fountain, where they swirled and eddied like oddly glowing water, like fog over a calm river.
The fountain, at last, was being replenished.
From where he stood fighting the gods, Clover faltered as if suffering a fatal blow.
Power rippled and fizzed around him in an unsettling way, as if he were a live wire cleaved in half, cut off from its source of power.
The more and more souls pooled into the fountain, the weaker he seemed.
He looked like Quince Travers had the night that started all of this on Dovermere Cove, deteriorating before their eyes.
He looked like Lia Azula whose tongue became emaciated, and Jordyn Briar Burke who had turned into an umbra.
He looked like the witch whose bones had broken and the warrior whose heart had stopped and the guardian whose soul was sucked out of him.
It was as if Clover’s body was going through every such horror.
As if, without the sustenance of the souls that had made him a god, he was becoming monstrous again.
Veins turning black along pale skin. Turquoise eyes losing their otherworldly glow, flashing with hurt as he contorted in pain.
He turned to face Emory, seeming to realize what was happening, what she was doing.
Emory felt how close she was to taking everything away from Clover—her own wretched ancestor, even if only distantly so. She could see it on his ashen face that his power was dwindling ever closer to extinction, until he was again just a Tidecaller, and perhaps not even that.
Just a man, painfully mortal.
And very, very angry.
His face contorted with a vengeful, vicious rage. Dust gathered around him, his faithful ash-monsters flocking to him as if to protect him. And just like that, Clover was gone—as if willing such power to him one last time—before he reappeared right in front of Emory.
She knew this would be the end. He looked like he was about to Collapse for good and take the whole universe with him in a killing blast. Maybe she had been too late.
Maybe taking power away from him, cutting him from his corrupt source, hadn’t worked one bit, and he would bring them all to ashes anyway.
Emory barely registered the body moving in front of her. She only made out the back of Sidraeus’s head before he barreled straight into Clover and the two of them tumbled farther away, rolling in the ash. And then Sidraeus was crouching over Clover, holding him down, his runes flaring bright white.
Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Clover’s power building around him, ready to scorch everything in its path. Sidraeus meeting Emory’s eye over his shoulder. His voice in her mind, soft as falling leaves.
You are a light, Emory Ainsleif. And it’s been the honor of a very dark and lonely lifetime to know you.
“NO!”
Clover’s magic erupted. But it did not sweep over them like a tidal wave of death. It concentrated around Sidraeus, into Sidraeus, making the runes on his skin come alive with electric light that flared brighter and brighter until the world was flooded white.
Emory couldn’t see anything but light, couldn’t feel anything except for the hole ripping open inside her, the loss so poignant it was unfathomable.
The blast of power did not reach her, did not hurt her, because Sidraeus was containing it.
Sidraeus was taking on the brunt of the attack, the full weight of Clover’s deadly residual magic.
Sidraeus was saving her, saving all of them.
And this would be his end.
When the light at last subsided, when everything quieted, Sidraeus’s body was splayed out on the ground next to Clover’s. Emory rushed over, tears streaming down her face, to find all the spiral runes on him gone, as if they had been wiped away by Clover’s magic.
Sidraeus’s skin was unblemished. No runes, no wounds.
A blast like that should have reduced him to cinders. But he opened his eyes—those beautiful, ecliptic eyes—and looked right at her. He reached a hand to her face, fingers so very delicate as they brushed her cheek, her lips.
“How?” Emory breathed.
He has fulfilled his bargain.
It was only then that Emory realized she and Sidraeus were surrounded by a familiar spiral of shadowy clouds, as if they were in the eye of a great cyclone frozen in time. The souls of the Tidecallers, whispering in their many-layered voices.
By being willing to die for the last Tidecaller, Sidraeus has put right what he broke so long ago, and so we protected him.
They seemed to draw closer to Sidraeus, addressing him directly.
Phoebus. Bright one. Sidraeus. You brought us to ruin, cast a shadow upon the magic you left behind, but you have redeemed yourself here, and we the souls of those you first abandoned forgive you.
Your bargain is ended. Your curse is lifted.
Sidraeus’s eyes shut as silent tears caught in his lashes. This was the redemption he had been looking for, and here it was granted.
The souls drew closer to Emory now, and when they spoke, their voices were full of yearning. And now for our curse, Tidecaller. We wish to be free.
“You deserve to be,” Emory whispered, and gave the souls what they asked, healing them like she had the umbrae. They began to dissipate, rushing into the fountain like the other ghosts Emory had laid to rest.
When all of them disappeared, the world around them was still—except for the blur of motion in the corner of her eyes.
Clover had pulled himself to his feet, alive but ashen, his face lined and sunken as if the years were finally catching up to him.
He must have been making his way toward Emory and Sidraeus, intent on killing them while they were trapped in the cyclone of souls.
But Luce got to Clover first, plunging what looked like the first witch’s discarded rib bone into his chest.
Clover’s face contorted with shock and pain, his eyes falling on Luce as if he couldn’t quite believe what was happening.
“This is for my daughter,” Luce seethed, stabbing him again.
“This is for everyone you lied to and used and brought to their deaths.” Again.
“For Asphodel and Thames and Cordelia most of all, whom you robbed of a great love, but not her legacy.” Clover slumped to the ground as Luce pulled the rib out of him.
She fell to her knees with him and held the bloodied bone over his heart.
“Let my face be the last you see, knowing that it’s your sister’s own flesh and blood who put an end to you. ”
It happened fast. One moment, Luce was holding the bloodied bone over Clover’s heart, and the next, he was the one holding it and slashing it wildly in defense.
A wet sound slipped from Luce’s lips. A strained gargle as blood sprayed all over Clover’s face. Luce stumbled backward, her hands going to her neck, where rivers of red rushed from a deep, horizontal slit.
A visceral scream tore from Emory’s throat as she caught her mother in her arms. She didn’t register what happened to Clover.
Didn’t register anything beyond the light fading too quickly from her mother’s eyes, the way she fought to look at Emory as blood gushed out of her, pooling around them both.
The hot, sticky feel of her hand as she touched Emory’s cheek.
The faint smile that stretched her red-stained lips, as if she wasn’t afraid to die if it meant her daughter lived.
Emory rejected it—this notion that anyone should have to die for her. Sidraeus had been willing to give up his life to save her, and now her mother, too, this woman who had already given up so much to protect her…
Enough.
The healing magic she’d grown up feeling so mediocre with poured out of Emory like a song echoing across the oceans of time that had once separated her and her mother. “Stay with me,” she pleaded. “Don’t leave me again.”
She felt like the young girl she’d once been, who’d looked out her lighthouse window time and time again, waiting for the sailor she’d always known would never come back.
But Luce had come back, and Emory refused to let her go.